by Tom Holt
“I pushed my way to the front and saw the most miraculous sight. That beer was actually clearing; the Irish moss must have done the trick after all. There was a very short interval, while everyone dived for vessels of any description, and then an orgy of sploshing noises while twenty involuntary abstainers made up for lost time. I had to use all my authority as captain to get close enough to the barrel to dip a tin cup in.”
“In the general excitement I had forgotten all about the alchemist, and when I emerged from the ruck round the barrel he was standing over me with a face only marginally more pleasing to the eye than Sir Francis Drake’s culverins. The only thing to do, I thought, was try to jolly him along.”
“‘Now look,” I said, “I’m sorry I pinched your beer but there’s plenty for everyone now. Grab a jug and get stuck in.”
“‘It wasn’t beer,” he said.
“‘Porter, then,” I replied, “perry, ale, whatever. Does it matter?”
“‘Yes,” he said. “That was my elixir.”
“‘Your what?” I asked.
“‘My elixir,” he replied. “The philosopher’s stone. The elixir of life. The living water.”
“I frowned” I hate beer snobs, don’t you? “All right,” I said, “so it was better than ship’s beer, but let’s not get carried away. They say you can get a very nice pint in Bristol.”
“‘It wasn’t beer,” he said solemnly. “It was elixir.”
“Then something clicked in my brain and I remembered something. I remembered that I had just fallen out of my own crow’s nest onto a deck of hard oak plants without suffering so much as a nosebleed.”
“‘Elixir?” I said.
“‘Yes,” he said. “E for Enrico, L for Lorenzo, I for Iachimo, X for Xeres, I for Iago, R for Roderigo, elixir. And you drank it.”
“I felt unwell. “Is it safe?” I asked.”
“He grinned. “I don’t know,” he said, “but it definitely works.” ”
“‘Does it?” I asked.
“‘I think you just proved that,” he said, “by falling out of the crow’s nest. Or how would you interpret it? Luck? A sudden gust of wind? Dry rot in the deck? What do you expect if you drink the elixir of life?”
The stranger fell silent and drew the tip of his finger round the rim of his glass. “Anyway,” he said at last, “that’s how I came to acquire eternal life, for what it’s worth. All this talk of beer has made me thirsty. Can I get you one?”
The young German replied in a small, awed voice that he would like another armagnac, and the stranger entered into an oral contract with a waiter for an armagnac and a half-litre of Stella Artois. Once the contract had been discharged to the satisfaction of both parties, the stranger continued.
“Not only me,” he said, “my whole crew as well. You see, when I spilt the rest of the stuff in the flagon, just before my untimely descent from the crow’s nest, it landed in the beer barrel, rendering the beer free from impurities and immortalising everyone who drank it. The alchemist saw it happen, and once he had calmed down he explained it all to us. I don’t think we were really convinced until he drank a half-pint of the beer and shot himself. Then we were all profoundly convinced.”
Especially the first mate; it was his pistol the alchemist borrowed, and when he pressed it to his head and pulled the trigger, the barrel burst. The first mate was livid, of course, but when he tried thumping Fortunatus Magnus all he did was squash his wedding-ring. The man was completely invulnerable. So were we all. As soon as it had sunk in, we all went completely mad and started belting each other about with our swords and roaring with laughter until there wasn’t anything larger than a paperknife left on the whole ship. Mind you, we had all been drinking rather heavily.
“As for Fortunatus, he cheered up very quickly. It turned out that he had been lugging this elixir of his around with him for years but had never found anyone brave enough to test it out on, and he was damned if he was going to risk it himself, since he was petrified of possible side-effects. Naturally we asked him what possible side-effects, but all he would say was that so far as he knew there weren’t any but we were bound to find out sooner or later, weren’t we? The only living thing he’d ever given any to, he told us, was a stray cat in Cadiz, and the contrary thing had escaped before he could do much in the way of properly-organised tests. Mind you, I don’t think he had intended to drink any himself, even when he saw that it hadn’t killed us outright. He just got caught up in the general spirit of adventure and wanted to justify his discovery to us. Common or garden scientific vanity. Well, there we are.”
“The next morning we got a breeze that took us straight into Bristol, where Fortunatus was immediately arrested as a Spanish spy and thrown in prison. He went very quietly for an invulnerable man, but when we offered to rescue him he said no, he’d much rather go quietly, since he had a lot to think over and prison seemed as good a place as any. So we left him to it and set out to spend five thousand gold pistoles on refreshments and riotous living.”
“We were all fairly well pleased with ourselves, as you can imagine, what with suddenly being made immortal and having five thousand gold pistoles. At first, we couldn’t see beyond the immediate benefits, such as being able to clean up on extremely dangerous wagers involving tall buildings, loaded firearms and ravenous bears; but even after the first wave of euphoria had worn off and nobody would bet us any more, we reckoned that we had done all right for ourselves, all things considered. For example, being immortal we were incapable of starving to death, which meant a tremendous saving on food; we could drink as much as we liked without the slightest danger of damaging our health; and since we were completely immune from what was then described as the Pox…Anyway, we felt we had every reason to be cheerful, one way or another. My only regret was that the morning before we left Cadiz I had wasted five pistoles taking out a life assurance policy, which was no obviously of no use whatsoever.”
As the stranger stopped speaking again the young German caught sight of his face. It was a terrible sight, completely indescribable, and the young German looked away quickly. He could still see it behind his eyelids days later. He felt a sudden urge to discuss the career of Charlemagne, but before he could do this the stranger resumed his narrative.
“However,” said the stranger, “there were side-effects. Shall I tell you about the side-effects? Do please say if you’d rather I didn’t. We could talk about Gustavus Adolphus if you like.”
“Tell me,” said the young German, “about the side effects.”
“We spent a fortnight in Bristol drinking to excess and laying up a cargo—wool, I think, and tin ore, and a bit of salt fish, definitely no jute—and then we left. We would have liked to stay longer, but we had somehow made ourselves unpopular in Bristol and most of the taverns had banned us—and that took some doing in Bristol, even then. So we set sail for Flanders, and we made good headway for a day or two, until the wind dropped again. But we didn’t care; we had plenty of beer now, and no killjoy alchemist on board. It was then we noticed it.”
“Noticed what?”
“The smell. The nastiest, most sordid, least pleasant smell you ever came across in all your born days. Nothing more unlike the scent of dewy roses could ever exist this side of Plato’s Republic. And the smell was coming from us.”
The stranger finished his drink and looked through the empty glass at something the young German couldn’t see. The young German decided that that was probably just as well.
“After a day of frantic and hysterical washing,” continued the stranger, “which only seemed to make it worse, one of us hit on the idea of consulting the alchemist’s notebooks, which he had left behind on the ship when he got arrested. Sure enough, we found the answer, in a passage where our old buddy Fortunatus was describing his experiments on the cat in Cadiz. He had done his best to get round the problem by fiddling the recipe here and there, and he was pretty positive he had fixed it, which I suppose explains why he drank it himself
after we’d done his guinea-pig work for him.”
“Well,” said the young German, “that was fascinating. I really ought to be getting…”
“I really wish,” said the stranger, “I could describe that smell for you now. Try to imagine, if you possibly can, a muck-heap on which someone has placed the decomposing bodies of three hundred and thirty-three dead foxes. Next to this muck-heap try and picture an open sewer. Not just an ordinary open sewer, mind—this one collects the effluent from an ammonia works on the way. The muck-heap is, of course, in the back yard of a cholera hospital…No, don’t bother. Just take it from me, it was an absolute zinger of a smell.”
“Anyway, it soon became painfully obvious that unless and until we found some way of toning this odour down a bit, the only place we could be was as far out in the middle of the ocean as we could possibly get. So we set sail for nowhere in particular, rationed the beer, and waited. We waited and we waited and we waited. Occasionally something would happen to relieve the monotony. A Barbary corsair would creep up on us and attempt to board us, which was good for a laugh. One of us would go for a swim, and an hour later you couldn’t see the surface of the water for dead fish. Not to mention the run-in we had with what you would know as the Spanish Armada; boy, did we have some fun with them! Oh, don’t get me wrong, there were the occasional highlights. But most of the time it was dead boring.”
“After three months we were all so crazy with boredom and mutual loathing that we decided to blow up the ship and ourselves with it. It didn’t do any good, of course. The ship blew up all right, but we didn’t. We floated, and after a while the number of dead fish got so embarrassing we decided we’d better swim on a bit before we wiped out the livelihood of every fisherman in the Atlantic Ocean. After a day or so of nonchalant doggy-paddling we ran into another ship. They must have been downwind of us, because before we’d got within two hundred yards of them they’d taken to the boats and were rowing away as fast as their arms could work the oars. That sort of thing really dents your self-confidence, you can imagine. You begin to despair of making those lasting relationships with people that add the interest to life.”
“Well, after we’d made the new ship comfortable—painted out the name and got it nice and squalid—we sailed on a bit longer and a bit longer still, and we came to a decision. The time had come, we decided, to try and do something about it, rather than tamely giving in. That’s the way we are in Holland; every brick wall you come to has big red marks where people have been beating their heads against it. Now it so happened that when we blew the ship up I had old Fortunatus’ notebooks in the pocket of my doublet, and although the ink had run in a few places they were still legible—I think he’d written them in some kind of incredibly clever new ink, and it makes you wonder why he ever bothered with turning base metals into gold when he had such a fantastically commercial proposition at his fingertips. Anyway, we read through those notebooks until we knew them by heart. We discussed them, argued about them, tried experiment after experiment, even tried reading them upside down; all totally useless, needless to say, but at least it passed the time, and although we didn’t discover an antidote to the elixir we did find out some extremely interesting things along the way. Extremely interesting…I’m sorry, I’m wandering off again. I do tend to do that, I’m afraid. It comes of having nothing to do for long periods of time but talk; it makes you extremely wordy.”
“Where was I? Oh yes. One morning, exactly seven years after we’d first drunk the elixir, we all woke up to find that the smell had actually gone. It was amazing. We were still invulnerable and immortal, of course, but at least we didn’t niff quite so much, and the first thing we did was set course for the nearest land-mass, which happened to be Le Havre. We had all assumed that one of our numerous experiments had finally worked, and that we’d cracked it.”
“We spent the next month getting thrown out of every tavern, inn and brothel in Le Havre, predictably enough, and we were just on the point of saying goodbye to each other and going our separate ways—as you can easily appreciate, after all that time on the ship and what with the smell and everything, we all hated each other so much you wouldn’t credit it—when the first delicate whiff of the Great Pong came filtering through and we knew that we weren’t home and dry after all. We spent a frantic afternoon buying up every drop of beer, every chess-set, every book and every piece of chemical apparatus that we could lay our hands on, and we got back to the ship just before a mob of extremely savage Frenchmen with handkerchiefs in front of their faces threw us into the sea.”
“We were still kidding ourselves that we had found an antidote and that it had worn off, and so we carefully recreated all the experiments we had done in the last seven years, and made scrupulous notes in proper joined-up writing in a big leather-bound book. But when we’d tried everything and nothing had worked, we lost heart and spent a whole year playing shoveha’penny all round the coast of Africa. We did land once or twice, but only for hours at a time, and there is—or was—a tribe in Madagascar that worships us as gods; pretty ceremonies, very heavy on the incense. Now then; seven years after our brief visit to La Havre, the smell stopped again, and we scrambled into Tangier to do our shopping—we wasted a week getting there, what with contrary winds—knowing full well that we had exactly a month before we had to leave. We were right, of course. Three weeks later, the smell came back, and seven years later it went away again. That’s the way the pattern works, and once we’d spent forty-nine years reading up on alchemical theory we all knew why, it was blindingly obvious.”
“We were all pretty good alchemists by then, incidentally, and that’s how we make our living. For eighty-three months in each seven years we turn base metal into gold, and in the remaining month we spend it. That’s the problem with alchemy; it works all right, but compared with simply taking a pick and a shovel and digging the stuff out of the ground it’s hopelessly inefficient. There I go again, digressing. Do please excuse me.”
There was a very, very long silence, during which the young German tried to recapture the use of his brain.
“So you’ve been alive since 1553?” he said at last.
“Yes,” said the stranger, “that puts it very neatly. And also in perspective. Is there anything else you want to ask me?”
“No,” said the German. “No, I think you’ve said quite enough.”
“Oh well,” said the stranger. “I seem to have that effect on people. Not,” he went on, “that I tend to tell my story much these days. In fact, you’re the first person in over thirty years I’ve told it to.”
“Well…” the young German started to say; then he thought better of it and decided to stare horribly at the stranger, like a man in one of Hieronymus Bosch’s less cheerful paintings. The stranger seemed to find the silence awkward, and to break the tension he started to speak again.
“Oh yes,” said the stranger, “I’ve had some interesting experiences in my time. Well, fairly interesting. Now you mentioned Napoleon a moment ago. The only time I met Napoleon…”
The young German suddenly jumped up, screamed, and ran away, very fast.
Vanderdecker shook his head and went to the bar for another drink. It had been roughly the same the last time he told the story, when he had landed in Porlock and met the man who was on his way to a wedding. That, he had said to himself, is the last time; but the pleasure of talking to someone new after seven years with Antonius, Johannes, Pieter and Cornelius had gone to his head.
In case you were wondering, the young German made a moderate recovery, after two or three months of careful nursing, and went on to become the composer of such celebrated operatic masterpieces as Lohengrin, Götterdämmerung and Parsifal. To his dying day, on the other hand, his manner was always very slightly unsettling, particularly to strangers, and if anyone happened to mention Philip II of Spain he would burst out into maniacal laughter which could only be cured with morphine injections. Unlike Vanderdecker’s earlier confidant, however, he n
ever became addicted to narcotics, and the rather garbled version of the story which he embodied in his opera The Flying Dutchman can probably be attributed to nothing more serious than artistic licence or a naturally weak memory.
FOUR
The plump young man is now two years older and an inch and an eighth plumper, and he has become a partner in the firm of Moss Berwick. Oddly enough, there were no comets seen that evening nine weeks ago when Mr Clough and Mr Demaris told him the wonderful, wonderful news; the only possible explanation is that it was a cloudy night, and the celestial announcement was obscured by a mass of unscheduled cumulo-nimbus. These things happen, and all we can do is put up with them.
Although they had made the plump young man (whose name, for what it is worth, was Craig Ferrara) a partner, they had not seen fit to tell him about The Thing. Or at least, they had not told him what it was; they had hinted at its existence, but that was all. For his part, Craig Ferrara had been aware that it existed for some time, ever since he had been allowed access to the computer files generally known in the firm as the Naughty Bits.
Moss Berwick’s computer was a wonderful thing. It lived, nominally, in Slough; but, rather like God, it was omnipresent and of course omniscient. Unlike God, you could telephone it from any one of the firm’s many offices and even, if you were a show-off like Craig Ferrara, from your car. You could ask it questions. Sometimes it would answer and sometimes not, depending on whether it wanted to. Not could, mark you; wanted to. It would take a disproportionate amount of ingenuity to think up a sensible question that the computer couldn’t answer if it wanted to, up to and including John Donne’s famous conversation-killers about where the lost years are and who cleft the Devil’s foot—and this despite the fact that the Devil is not (as yet) a client of Moss Berwick.